2023
Deloitte's CortextAI application utilizes cutting-edge AI technologies to extract valuable insights from what begins as unstructured data. The platform offers natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to allow the analysis of huge amounts of textual information.
I didn't know what to expect from this project. Deloitte. A big data company with solid products and 300,000 employees worldwide. Tax, consulting, audit, finance - software that tackles big problems. It was going to be sponge mode from day one. I was fortunate to be partnering with Talia, a smart UX designer who had been working with Deloitte for a few months already. She knew the design system and had relationships with most of the client staff from team QuickStart. She had access to several dozen Figma files in various stages of completion that would be our idea space in the coming months.
Our team was challenged to evaluate recent research and customer service feedback in order to define and prioritize opportunities for improvement within the application.
Facilitating a team discussion about data model approvals using Figjam
My mission was to engage UX, product, development, and customer success teams to understand the technical complexity of the system and to define solutions for known and new usability issues. Responsibilities included understanding and refining requirements, benchmarking, creating low and high fidelity mockups, creating interactive prototypes, and iterating until solutions were approved. Primary tools: Figma, Figjam, Jira.
Our primary partners were two key Deloitte staffers with access to product owners, subject matter experts and developers. I was pleased to learn that the Deloitte UX team already maintained a strong relationship with members of the dev team and that there was a fairly extensive design system already in place.
The early days were focused on learning the basics of CortexAI, getting to know the team and becoming familiar with dozens (or was it hundreds) of Figma pages and artboards. It took little time for me to learn that I was surrounded by people who wanted to consider all perspectives. It was my job to listen, sort and prioritize, It was my job to make sure that we all of the right people involved at the right time without meeting ourselves to death.
Iterating on Data Preparation activities in Figma (intentionally blured)
Based on PO and user input, our team evaluated workflows across the system to identify areas where design could impact usability or efficiency. Our team of four managed the implementation of a new company-wide design system to achieve consistency in a platform that was not originally built on top of a style guide.
After several months of collaborating (Agile-style), I learned again the very real benefits of including developers in the ideation and design process. Handoffs were efficient with early buy-in as there were plenty of opportunities to clarify UI and functionality before we posted final requirements in Jira.
Workshopping with Deloitte's Customer Service Group to evaluate the User Journey (intentionally blurred)
Users of the current system were creating workflows using blocks on one screen that referenced data from another location within the application. To review this data, users would click a block in the flow diagram to launch a modal with some details that covered the primary view. Clicking on a row in that modal to see the data would launch a second, nested modal window. In this workflow, the user was always 2 clicks away from the diagram that was their primary target each time they needed to validate their data.
Iterating on a specific step in the user flow (intentionally blurred)
After wireframing several ideas - including popovers and tabbed modals - the team received positive feedback on a solution using resizable windows. The solution provided inline editing that users wanted within one click of the flow diagram view and the windows retained the most recent view. We call that a reduction in cognitive load.
This screen (intentionally blurred) needed to deliver a lot of information in the context of the original map view. Within a few iterations in Figma, we were able to demonstrate a resizable overlay with a show-hide feature to replace the original nested modal workflow.